NCT:noise-control multi-object tracking

Abstract

AbstractMulti-Object Tracking (MOT) is an important topic in computer vision. Recent MOT methods based on the anchor-free paradigm trade complicated hierarchical structures for tracking performance. However, existing anchor-free MOT methods ignore the noise in detection, data association, and trajectory reconnection stages, which results in serious problems, such as missing detection of small objects, insufficient motion information, and trajectory drifting. To solve these problems, this paper proposes Noise-Control Tracker (NCT), which focuses on the noise-control design of detection, association, and reconnection. First, a prior depth denoise method is introduced to suppress the fusion feature redundant noise, which can recover the gradient information of the heatmap fusion features. Then, the Smoothing Gain Kalman filter is designed, which combines the Gaussian function with the adaptive observation coefficient matrix to stabilize the mutation noise of Kalman gain. Finally, to address the drift noise issue, the gradient boosting reconnection context mechanism is designed, which realizes adaptive trajectory reconnection to effectively fill the gaps in trajectories. With the assistance of the plug-and-play noise-control method, the experimental results on MOTChallenge 16 &17 datasets indicate that the NCT can achieve better performance than other state-of-the-art trackers.